What settlements look like

Anyone who wants to understand Israeli settlements should understand how they look to Palestinians. Here are three pictures from Hamde Abu Rahmah’s facebook page. An olive tree has been dismembered to make way for more land confiscation for a settlement in the first shot, in the second we see how young Palestinians see Jews inside the occupied territories, and in the last we see children looking out on stolen village land and a settlement. K.E. Feldman will be posting later about recent events in the occupied territories, I hope she can tell us where these heartbreaking shots are from, these pictures that make her and me ashamed of the organized Jewish community. Meantime, she passes along the news about Gandhi’s grandson, below these pictures.

Rajmohan Gandhi, Mahatma Gandhi’s grandson, visited Bil’in on Sunday and praised the people’s steadfastness, saying, "It is our duty to awaken the international community from its sleep and make them aware of what is happening in Palestine."

That night, the Israeli army came to the home of 27-year-old Yaser Awad Yaseen and presented hm with an order to appear at the Shabak (security force) office, for an unstated reason. And on Friday night, the IDF jeeps rolled through the village in search of 18-year-old Yaser Mahir. Hamde reports, "It had been two and a half weeks since the last night raid, in which Bil’in was declared a closed military area and Israeli and international activists were prohibited from entering the village."

From the Bil’in Popular Committee report:

Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi said that the visit of Gandhi and the symbolism represented by a grandson of Mahatma Gandhi who led India’s struggle for liberation from colonialism and racial discrimination and access to independence, to see a particular struggle of the Palestinian people and see the suffering of our people in the rest of the Occupied Palestinian attacks daily extremist settlers and the occupation forces is a significant achievement.

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